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Take Me Into the Ballgame

WITH the revelation that the 1919 World Series had been fixed, Ring Lardner soured on the game that he had covered for a succession of Chicago newspapers and that had inspired the "busher's letters" that made him famous. While the White Sox of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Cubs of Frank Chance set out upon their desert trails, in the years remaining to Lardner he hardly wrote about baseball at all.

Yet in an otherwise loving obituary notice in The New Republic in 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald pushed past his friend's work to focus unkindly on his unpropitious formative years. "When most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy's game," Fitzgerald wrote. "A writer can spin on about his adventures after 30, after 40, after 50, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of 25. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had the diameter of Frank Chance's diamond."

The observation was unfair as well as unkind, for Lardner's genius lay precisely in the depth of his cut — an apt measure of a Dostoyevsky or an Austen if not of Fitzgerald himself. The action of "You Know Me Al" (1916) — a fragmented novel consisting of six letters home from a pitcher just called up to the White Sox from the Central League — may have been confined, but Lardner populated his baseball world with realistic characters who, thanks to his unerring ear, spoke like real people who hadn't come from fancy schools. His supernumeraries included the baseball heroes Ty Cobb and John McGraw, but not content with verisimilitude of the type then common in juvenile novels about the game, Lardner brilliantly threw a skunk into the parlor in the fictional person of the narrator, Jack Keefe. An oddly endearing narcissist, Keefe is a cross between Clint Eastwood and Candide, never meeting the obstacle he couldn't conquer with bluff or dumb luck. In his letters to Al, he wields his optimism as a cudgel from beginning to end. No wiser on the last page than he was on the first, he is a new American anti-hero.

Yet if Fitzgerald was wrong about Lardner he was right about baseball. Its base paths have proven to be perilous terrain for writers who won fame on other fields. Since publication of Lardner's masterwork, imaginative writing about baseball has proliferated, but hardly any of it has been good.

Some novels elude this broad-brush indictment: "The Southpaw" (1953), by Mark Harris, is, like "You Know Me Al," a dialect novel narrated by a pitcher. "The Celebrant" (1983), by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, gets both the baseball and the arc of the story right. And, most notably, Don DeLillo's "Underworld" (1997) opens with a dazzling passage (published separately as the novella "Pafko at the Wall") in which Bobby Thomson, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover, among others, swirl around a young man who has nabbed the trophy ball of a lifetime. But DeLillo's tour de force is only a shard from an 827-page novel, and Thomson's "shot heard round the world," the home run that swung the balance of power, soon yields center stage to more ominous shots at less playful sites. DeLillo is wise to move to the larger world, where big ideas can frolic comfortably, rather than risk planting his feet in the wet cement of unrelieved baseball fictions with their metaphysical itchings. For it seems no extended form of baseball fiction can very long be about the thing itself before careering off into allegory, burlesque or bathos. A baseball writer does best when he stays grounded in the game, wedded to its details as a poet might be. The game may reveal character, as it does in real life, but when it becomes the backdrop or, worse, springboard for cosmic truths it usually ends up as a corkboard, push-pinned with colorful but exceedingly lightweight ideas.

Popular success and even critical acclaim may go to such metaphorical grab-bags as "The Natural" (1952), by Bernard Malamud, and the very different film it spawned; or W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" (1982), cinematically rendered as the three-hanky "Field of Dreams"; or Douglass Wallop's "Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant" (1954), which became the musical "Damn Yankees!" As for original drama, baseball purists will tell you that the movie "Bull Durham" (1988) is the nonpareil of all baseball literature because it is so . . . realistic. But this sort of verisimilitude — the recreated feeling of being there, close to the game — is old hat to readers who, thanks in part to TV and radio, can see and hear the game for themselves. This has left most baseball fiction uncomfortably stranded between journalistic realism and strained metaphors for lost youth and the ineffable sadness of it all. For all but a few, the modest diameter of Derek Jeter's diamond does indeed constrict.

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And there's the rub, or at least the first of two. If the best writing about the game is grounded in detail about double switches and squeeze plays, this is a good description of baseball journalism, which has truly been the game's literary glory. While we still want our baseball novelists to get the details of the game right — it fatally impugns their authority to do otherwise — we need more from them in the way of creating memorable characters. Then there's the other problem: we crave realism from the imaginative renderings of an activity that itself is not real. Play is metaphoric action. Like novelists who write about theater or film, the writer tackling baseball always starts off at one remove from reality, and is always playing catch-up.

One novelist to recognize baseball's fundamental unreality — and to my mind the only one to mount a serious challenge to Lardner in creating a vivid and unique baseball-playing literary character while hurdling the philosophical tripwire — is Robert Coover in his 1968 novel, "Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop."

Literary critics have sniffed out the allegorical hints in Coover's tale of a man obsessed with a single-player baseball-themed table-game of his own devising, in which the players are controlled by rolls of the dice. Waugh's name can be condensed to "JHWH," the transliterated name of God; and although he created the rules and casts the die, each roll of the bones brings to him, to his players and to the reader an illusion of free will. But the simple symbolism is mere sleight of hand, a misdirection from the universal human longing to control one's own small world — to inhabit a blissful state without instinctual frustration, without interaction with potentially disruptive external objects, without time, and within something greater than oneself. As Waugh tells a bar girl after his deist dice roll has given his pitcher a perfect game: "Think of it . . . to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better. . . . In a way, you know, it's even sad somehow, because, well, it's done, and all you can hope for after is to do it a second time."

What Coover may have viewed as a retreat to the womb we today, with our play space diminished from a ball field to a computer screen, call fantasy baseball. In his version of what has transformed a pastime into an obsession, the players generate statistics, a long season, a storybook finish, a game within a game, and a world within a world. Today, millions of desktop magnates preside over teams of their own construction — the statistics are what matter, no humans need apply. In its dark, unreal loneliness Coover's baseball novel is, for 21st-century readers of fiction, the heights, or depths, of realism. He cuts deep into the cake.

John Thorn is the editor of "The Armchair Book of Baseball." He is currently working on a book about baseball origin myths.